Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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СКАЧАТЬ influence within the African American community. She adds further that only his capacity to build effective political alliances (through nonviolent direct action strategies) fully explains Randolph’s leadership and the increasing influence of the BSCP. During World War II, the March on Washington Movement—a cross-class African American movement—legitimized the “ideology of civil disobedience” among young African Americans. Although Randolph and the BSCP continued to forge links across class lines within the African American community, for him, interracial alliances with varieties of sympathetic white organizations and constituencies gained increasing sway in the years after World War II. In substantial detail, Pfeffer shows how these alliances developed through such diverse organizations as the National Council for a Permanent FEPC, the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, the Emergency Committee Against Military Jim Crow, and especially the prayer pilgrimages and youth marches on Washington, D.C., to speed up the desegregation of schools during the 1950s. Together, these efforts fueled the emergence and spread of the modern social justice movement that eventually helped to shatter the larger Jim Crow edifice.²¹

      Whereas Pfeffer emphasizes the emergence of powerful interracial alliances in the post–World War II years, historian Beth Bates analyzes the process by which Randolph and the BSCP built networks of support within the black community and helped to transform an often anti-union constituency into an indispensable ally. Basing her research on the BSCP campaign to organize Pullman porters in Chicago, the company’s backyard, Bates convincingly argues that previous studies of the BSCP failed to systematically analyze the relationship between the BSCP and the larger black community. In careful detail, she shows how Randolph and the BSCP gradually built “protest networks” from the ground up. Through the work of black clubwomen (particularly the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Club), the union’s Citizens Committee for the Brotherhood, and a series of labor conferences following the aborted strike of 1928, the intra-racial alliance building activities of the BSCP gradually gained widespread community-based support. This support included the influential Chicago Defender as well as a wide range of religious, civic, and social service organizations (including local branches of the National Urban League and NAACP), as reflected in the rise of the National Negro Congress (NNC) and later the MOWM, although Randolph soon resigned as president of the NNC following disputes over the role of the Communist Party in the organization. Bates convincingly argues that community networks represented “the connective tissue between the porters’ union and the politics of the black community.”²²

      Another theme in recent historiography is a recurring effort to pinpoint the role of Randolph and the BSCP in the transition of African American politics from an earlier largely dependent “clientage politics” to a new independent politics of protest. According to historian Cornelius Bynum, for example, by the end of World War II, Randolph had evolved a philosophy of social struggle that incorporated notions of “interest group politics and mass action” in the larger civil rights and political struggles of black people in mid-twentieth-century America. In Bynum’s view, these ideas built directly on Randolph’s foundational notions “that genuine social justice required fair access to civil and economic rights and that race and class posed unique challenges for black workers.” In a similar vein, Pfeffer maintains that Randolph’s and the BSCP’s commitment to “nonviolent, direct mass action” facilitated the transition from an older, weaker politics dependent on unreliable white allies to aggressive public demands for equal rights, backed by the power of organizations allied with the BSCP. In her conceptualization of networks of support and alliance-building activities within the black community, Bates emphasizes the role of such networks in the transformation of black political behavior and strategies from what she calls a “politics of civility” or “Old Crowd” politics (a term coined by Randolph and the Messenger), to “New Crowd” politics, characterized by vociferous demands for equal rights from a position of organized strength rather than a position of weakness.²³

      Although historians and other scholars have not returned to Spero and Harris’s specific critical stance, a renewed critique of Randolph has emerged nonetheless. There were boundaries to Randolph’s conception of equal rights. For example, contemporary scholarship gives substantial attention to notions of manhood, femininity, and gender inequality. In his analysis, Bynum focuses on Randolph’s notion of masculinity or manhood as a critical factor leading him to a vigorous analysis of social justice for African Americans in general and black workers in particular. According to Bynum, notions of manhood articulated by the white socialist Eugene Debs and the black intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly in his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), helped to bridge Randolph’s ideological transition to socialism. Initially, Randolph stood closely with Debs’s formulation of class over race, but over time gravitated toward Du Bois’s race-conscious notion of manhood. Similarly, Beth Bates shows how Randolph and the Brotherhood challenged Pullman’s paternalistic racism through the idiom of manhood rights in the years leading to the company’s recognition of the BSCP as the bargaining agent. Such notions, which were inspired by early Emancipation-era struggles for full citizenship rights, included women as well as men. Although black women faced the brunt of racial and class inequality, they not only joined the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Club in support of the BSCP, but also supported the BSCP’s women’s auxiliary, the Chicago Colored Women’s Economic Council, as wives and other female relatives of porters. Twentieth-century studies of African American women’s history, most notably Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves (1999), examine the connection between the women of the BSCP and established middle-class African American women’s organizations. Having pursued extensive primary research on the subject, White shows how the porters’ Ladies Auxiliary pressed its members’ middle-class counterparts into greater action on behalf of the black working class. Following a meeting with the National Council of Negro Women, Auxiliary president Helena Wilson wrote to the secretary treasurer of the BSCP unit: “I attended a session of the Council’s Convention . . . and I was not very satisfied with the discussions given to the lower income working groups.” When women answered the call for help from Randolph and the BSCP, they embraced the ideas of manhood and manhood rights as part of the larger ongoing struggle for full human rights.

      Yet women’s indispensable support of the BSCP did little to lessen the gender barrier within the union or the workplace. Melinda Chateauvert’s Marching Together offers the most detailed critique of women and gender issues in the BSCP. Chateauvert documents the constraints that gender as well as class and racial conventions and social practices imposed on black women within the union as well as the union’s women’s auxiliary. Although women provided indispensable support to the union, they nonetheless confronted a series of limitations and slights. As Cheateauvert notes, “The Ladies’ Auxiliary was the distaff side of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. . . . Randolph’s propaganda stressed black manhood rights, calling for better working conditions, a family wage, respect from fellow workers, and equal citizenship. But for men to achieve manhood, women must be feminine; Brotherhood rhetoric depicted women as admiring wives, rarely noting their pivotal role in the twelve-year struggle for unionization.”²⁴

      In addition to the Ladies’ Auxiliary, some two hundred black women also worked as maids, car cleaners, and “porterettes” for the Pullman Company. Maids belonged to the union, paid dues, and suffered reprisals (including firings) for their union membership and activities. Still, not only did male members of the Brotherhood make it difficult for maids to adopt the notion of “manhood rights” on their own behalf as workers, but female members of the Auxiliary also refused to endorse female Pullman employees as members of the union with workplace and other grievances alongside those of men. Invariably, Auxiliary activities focused on ways to buttress the cause of male porters by increasing the efficiency of their wives and other female relatives as homemakers. Pullman maids found few sympathetic forums for voicing their particular complaints against the company. In 1929, when the AFL grudgingly granted the Brotherhood a federal charter, the union dropped “and Maids” from its earlier name: the “Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids.”

      Following union victory against the Pullman Company in 1936, Randolph and the BSCP moved from the rhetoric of “manhood” СКАЧАТЬ